Personally a fan of Ansible, but I've also been pretty impressed by SaltStack as well. Either is much simpler and easier to use than the older generations of configuration management tools (cfengine, Puppet, Chef.)
I've never heard of ansible being referred to as a new generation. What do you think defines this generation? I use puppet and chef a fair bit so I'm just curious on the new features offered.
My take is that this "newer generation" of tools seems to focus on combining configuration management with orchestration. Chef and Puppet let you define the static state of the world but leave it up to you to figure out how to transition when something needs to change.
On the other hand, Ansible works well as simply a remote task runner (like Fabric). Salt is the one I have least experience with, but I had a conversation with the creator once and he seemed excited about the orchestration possibilities with Salt. If I understand correctly you can react to events that get triggered either manually or based on a condition on some other server you're managing. So both of these tools make it easy/natural to do something like run a rolling restart of a group of servers.
I'm not finding the new generation term particularly meaningful.
One thing that was somewhat unique about Ansible was it was designed for rolling updates as the initial use case, and the desire to solve deployment problems rather than just CM problems.
Everybody tends to view orchestration differently, so see our take:
>I've never heard of ansible being referred to as a new generation. What do you think defines this generation?
IMO, it's three things:
* A push-by-default model rather than pull-by-default (that never made sense to me: option, maybe - default, HELL no).
* A focus on minimizing the dependencies (puppet has a ton of annoying unnecessary and attack-surface-increasing/ RAM-gobbling dependencies from the agent to the SSL authentication).
* Not using a DSL - just using YAML and an intentionally dumb templating language - helping to enforce a far cleaner separation between configuration and code (the divide can get muddied with puppet because its DSL is too powerful).
